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So I guess it is that time again… when the broken faced child comes out of the woodwork…
I use this expression ‘broken face child’ as if I expected you to know what I am talking about… You probably don’t.
So let me explain: When you were little, things happened to you that were beyond your comprehension. You had to make up some story,some interpretation of what was happening. It is normal.
The ‘normal’ story everyone makes up is this: ‘There is something wrong here. Either with me, or with them, or with the world, that’s why this is happening.’
Most of us made up: ‘There is something wrong with me.’
When you are looking at it with sober eyes, looking at a little kid of the same age as you were, it is clear, or at least should be, that there was nothing wrong with you. And likely what was happening had nothing to do with you at all.
But a child is 100% self-centered, self-referential, and can only look at the world, to what’s happening, in relationship to himself/herself. So this is normal.
Being able to see the world independent of you is an adult capacity.
Looking at the Starting Point Measurements, it is crystal clear that you, nearly all of you, have development that was arrested at a child level, and you never got to the point where you could see that the world is not responding to you. They are not responding to you. They don’t even see you. You can be you, and the world will be OK. Really.
But you are stuck at the story you made up… and now live as if it actually happened.
Until you do the work and separate the facts from your fiction, and get that your story never happened, you won’t be able to get past it, and you’ll be, for yourself, that ‘broken face child’ of that story.
The methodology of separating the facts from the story is taught in the Playground Method… And that separating the facts from the fiction can make the biggest difference in your life. It will allow you to become an adult.
Being an adult is delightful.
Really. Things happen and they have no relationship to you. You are free to be… however you want to be. Your results, of course, will depend on your actions, your attitudes, but that’s it. Nothing else.
It’s heaven. A burden lost.
Life is cyclical. In addition to the visible cycles, there are invisible cycles.
They intimately connect to some early life events… there is nothing you can do about them coming up: a cycle must repeat.
One of these cycles is the broken faced child coming out to torment you.
Rarely if ever I see someone who has something worth envying.
Envy is a sign that they have something that you want, for yourself. It is a good thing if you look at it that way.
In most of us, the soul has a warped way to communicate to us. Probably because we don’t listen to gentler nudges.
So, yesterday I saw something that I’d like. In this Tai Lopez person I write about in my previous article.
So, just before I went to bed I muscletested if his IQ is higher than mine.
His IQ is lower than mine.
Then I asked: is he happy? And the answer was a ‘no.’
Am I happy? And the answer was a weak yes.
Hm. Interesting.
Osho talks about ‘nothing fails like success’ but it is hard to believe him, unless you have experienced it yourself.
And I don’t feel successful.
Because some odd way being famous is part of what I would consider success for me.
Given what I do, no matter how good it is, no matter how ground breaking it is, the likelihood of being famous is none.
So that is that ‘weak yes’… The worldly success has and will elude me.
But when I compare it to the ‘clear no’ of Tai… I’ll take my weak yes any time of the week.
And yet… the question is there: how could I be more successful in the world? How could I have my cake and eat it too.
Climbing the Tree of Life (all inner) and have success in the world (all outer).
That is a question no one has answered yet. How do I know? I muscletest successful people. They look, talk, give the appearance of being on a higher spiritual level. When I ask: is he happy? is she happy? the answer has always been ‘no.’ Clear no. Strong no.
Then I ask the ‘spiritual’ people, Mother Teresa, the pope, the Buddha, Osho, and except for the Buddha, it is all clear no. The Buddha tested a weak yes.
So my ‘weak yes’ stands out.
It’s because it is really hard to have your cake and eat it too.
Having your cake is spiritual, in the vertical, eating your cake is worldly, horizontal.
So my question is: can I teach anything intelligent, actionable, that would also create happy, or at least closer to happy?
I’ve learned a management technique from Robert Fritz’s Corporate Tides book.
In corporation the big issue is change. How to cause change from the top down. Without change the growth stops, without change death, decline sets in. So it is a big issue for corporation.
When you look at yourself as a corporation, if you look intelligently, you can see that some aspects of you want change, other aspects of you don’t… And it is always the lower aspects that don’t want change that win out… sometimes by pulling you back from change.
This is what this article is about: meeting the broken faced child again.
About and for people who were brought back, through a cycle, to where they began, or maybe even below.
In order to see what is going on, really, we have to go below the visible, below the surface.
What wakes up, what gets scared and more and more resistant when you start getting ahead, when you start to successfully climb the tree of life?
Other ‘teachers’ say: it is the subconscious. And partially they are right: certain sentences are stored in the subconscious… This only means: you have suppressed them. Suppressed them because they were difficult to deal with… and still are. Sentences about you. Memories about you.
But the subconscious doesn’t act, doesn’t act out.
It is the ego that acts out. Ego is forceful, commanding, and supervising your every action.
Your inner team has active and inactive participants. Ego is very active. You can’t escape it, It is there… and watches you like a hawk.
Ego’s entire effort is to keep you and your ‘corporation’ safe by a mistaken principle: stay the same. You have survived till this day, so that is a safe bet.
Growth, change for growth, is a threat to ego.
So what is the move, what are the moves of ego?
Ego is like a parent in its behavior.
It will slap you silly, while shouting all the things you have suppressed in the subconscious: ‘you are stupid, inferior, dirty, lazy, can’t do anything right… etc. etc. etc.‘
And it says: ‘who do you think you are? what is possessing you to think that you can? that you are allowed? that you deserve it?‘
Just like your parents are or were, or would have been had you dared to rock the boat.
Parental disapproval syndrome. Can’t escape it.
All the worldly successful people had parents that didn’t yell like that.
I didn’t had parents just like that. You did too. So we need something clever to make this work.
Robert Fritz says that to grow, to change, you need to manage the ego.
Now, let me take a little time to explain: if you look at yourself as a unit, this can’t work. If your habitual way of being is to say ‘me, myself, and I’ this isn’t going to work.
You have to see your parts as a TEAM, or it can’t work. Just like a corporation has departments, and leaders, managers, supervisors, and workers.
The ego is the level of supervisor.
Got it? If you don’t get it, read it again… please.
OK, the technique:
The job is to manage the valid fears, the valid needs of the ego.
By validating those fears, validating those need, by nurturing the ego, by embracing the fears.
In the beginning it will take time to dig out and unearth what is there. The rabbit hole may go deep.
This is the work we’ll did in the Detached class.
It requires a lot of pondering, looking, and a willingness to get naked.
Unless you know exactly what’s there, your nurturing, understanding, validation, will be ineffective. It happens all the time… it’s like a bullet that misses the target… the ego just laughs at you, and sabotages all your desire to move, all your desire to grow.
The elements of what needs to be embraced are a mix of cultural and personal statements.
The more you can dig out, the more successful you can become, in spite of your Parental Disapproval Syndrome.
Want to grow? You need to do this work. Deeply, thoroughly, completely.
The successful people who are not happy, grow to the level the ego allowed them to grow to. But wherever they are now, the ego is making them stop, and be miserable.
You are only happy when you grow.
If you are miserable at 100K, you are definitely going to be miserable at a million dollars.
Unless you become first happy where you are, and then grow from happy.
Really, no growth is going to fix your misery.
So while we do the work with the ego… we practice accepting, validating, allowing… the states of being that lead to what you call happy… so our growth won’t happen from misery.
When it does, the only thing you grow is your misery.